The Dead Have A Thousand Dreams (4 page)

“One day I go down to
village hall, the police station, I tell Alex Tarkashian I want to
turn myself in. I want to confess that I’d killed the Pope. I was
sure that somewhere along the line I’d killed the Pope. Alex says,
‘Well, I’ll arrest you if you want, only thing is, the Pope isn’t
dead.’ He’s been a little
leery
of me ever since.”

We took a series of trails
that led us around a gigantic mess of swamp. All you could see on
one side were acres of reeds and tannin-saturated water the color
of weak tea. This, said Wooly, is how the town got its name. This
was the Hidden Lake. This particular swamp was the hidden lake in
the woods, fed—like the rest of the Paumanok—by trillions of
gallons of water from a vast underground river system that ran 50
feet below the surface.

“One night,” he said, “I
just decided I’d had it. I couldn’t do this anymore. I kept a gun
in the house, an old Beretta. Made sure it was loaded, said fuck it
all and shoved the barrel in my mouth. Now maybe if I’d just rested
the thing on my lips, things would’ve been different. But me, I’ve
gotta do things all the way, you know? I shove the barrel all the
way inside. Turns out the tooth I had back here, the molar? It was
a bad tooth. I hit the thing with the gun and the pain shoots
through every square inch of my skull. The pain was so bad—I’m
screaming like I’ve never screamed before—I forgot all about
killing myself.”

“I guess that’s some kind
of miracle.”

“Yeah? Wait—I call my
dentist. It’s like one in the morning. He says can it wait? I say
get your ass down to your office and I’ll meet you there. I get in
the car, start driving. I’m taking a road along the edge of the
woods, I’m out maybe two minutes, the car dies. Middle of nowhere,
I’m doing 30, 40 miles per, the car just drops dead on me. The
engine cuts out, the headlights go off. I’m sitting there, the
headlights go on again, then off, then on and off again, maybe
three or four times all by themselves. Mind you, the next day, when
I found the car again, I had it checked out. Nothing wrong with it.
Engine, electrical system—not a thing wrong.”

“Okay.”

“So I get out, try to look
under the hood, only it’s pitch fucking black I can’t see a thing.
Just then I hear a woman crying. She’s like coming from the woods.
I hear her crying, then she’s calling my name. She’s calling Wooly,
Wooly Cornell. And I’m not hearing her
in
my head. She’s coming from out
there. Definitely from the woods.

“I say, Who the fuck’re
you? She says, ‘Do you want to keep going on like this? Do you want
to keep doing it this way?’ I don’t know what the hell is going on.
All of a sudden, these ghost lights, these clouds of fire, start
rising up over the trees.”

“Ghost lights?”

“That’s what we call ‘em.
People see ‘em out here all the time. Strange lights in the woods.
Everything around you goes quiet. Bugs, crickets, animals—there’s
no sound whatsoever. Far back as the 1600s there’s reports of
lights in the woods.”

“Swamp gas.”

“Possibly, yeah—I know
that. You got your plant life, animal matter decomposing in the
marshes, it produces methane. And methane can ignite as it rises.
But there could be more to it than that. The Algonquins, a lot of
their burial grounds are still out here. That’s what some people
think it is. They think the spirits of the dead are still in these
woods.”

“Anyway.”

“Okay, I see these ghost
lights, they’re rising from where this woman’s voice seems to be.
So I start following her. What the hell. I go into the woods, I
want to find out what this is all about. The woman keeps calling
me, only slowly moving away from me. And the lights keep following
her, deeper in to the woods. I keep following, I follow, I follow.
I have to know what’s going on. How long this all took I have no
idea, but eventually the lights brought me pretty much where we are
right now. Incredible, right?”

“It’s still just swamp
gas.”

“Maybe. But how do you
explain the woman’s voice?”

“I’ll be polite and say I
can’t.”

“And how do you explain
what happened next? I’m wandering blind out here, scared out of my
mind, but I want to know what this is. I’m walking just where we’re
walking now, it all stops. The voice stops. The lights stop. It all
just disappears. I’m standing here all by myself, lost who the fuck
knows where, with no light but the moon. I figured this was it. I’d
be lost out here forever. I was sure I was going to die.

“Then I see this light,
right over there, through those bushes. It’s like a glowing, a
fire. But it’s not a ghost light. It’s too close to the ground,
it’s not up in the sky. So I head that way. C’mon.”

We left the trail and
stumbled through a patch of thick brush.

“It was that tree,” he
said, “that oak. You see that oak?”

He was pointing to an
unpretentious, medium size oak maybe 20 feet tall.

“That oak was glowing like
a Christmas tree. It was pulsing with lights, every square inch of
it. I get a little closer, I see that thousands of fireflies are
all over the thing. They were swarming on every branch, every
frigging leaf. It was just amazing to see. And the silence.
Complete, total silence. No crickets, no cicadas, no nothing. I
thought I’d finally lost my mind.

“
Then I take a step closer
and, I don’t know, I guess I came too close. Whoosh. Like
that”—snap—“the fireflies take off. The Christmas tree goes out.
The whole thing goes black. All I can see now is something out
there, past those bushes. Something shining in the moonlight,
something big and round. I was right here, exactly right here when
I saw it. It looked, I swear, like a giant bald head lit by the
moon. So I make my way over there and—“

He grabbed my arm and
pulled me through the rest of the brush.

“I make my way over here,”
he said, parting the branches with his other hand, “and this is
what I see.”

I couldn’t believe what I
was looking at. A huge, big ass boulder was sitting squat in the
middle of a clearing. It was maybe 25 feet long, 15 feet high, and
had to weigh close to 100 tons. And it was resting not on the
ground but on about a dozen smaller stones. The boulder was
perfectly balanced—shit,
impossibly
balanced—on a ring of tiny, two-foot-high stones.
I’d never seen anything like it. It looked for all the world like
it had been carefully lowered from the sky.

“That night,” he said,
“when I first saw it, you know, I didn’t know what the fuck I was
looking at, but I’m standing here maybe 20 seconds, 30 seconds, not
long, I start to feel this, this feeling of
peace
. I start to feel
calm—something’s calming me down. I don’t know, but it was like I’d
dropped a drug. It was like something was opening up in my
bloodstream and calming me down. I didn’t know what was
happening—and after all the shit that’d gone down, shit,
anything
was
possible—but something was happening. Something got me down deep,
and the longer I stood here the deeper it took me. I think it
was—how can I put this?—I think it was
bliss
. You know, follow your fucking
bliss? Only there was nothing to follow here. This was
it
.”

We moved closer to the
boulder, walking around it, taking the whole thing in.

“Every time I come out
here,” he said, “same thing. There’s something about this rock,
this place. You know, you go back again, you look at the history of
this area, the Algonquins believed there were sacred sites in the
woods. They believed there were certain places where the powers of
the earth all focused and came together. I think this is one of
those places. I think there’s a kind of ancientry here, you know?
There’s a force here that flows from some ancient source. Can you
feel it?”

Funny thing was, I could.
I could feel a definite pull on my mind, a soft, hypnotic tugging.
He was right—there almost was a drug feel to it, almost like some
geomagnetic opiate was being carried through the air.

“What
is
this thing?”

“It’s what you call
a
dolmen
,” said
Wooly. “What it is, actually, was a tomb. They’ve been found in the
British Isles—Ireland, Scotland, the like. Also in parts of Asia
and the Middle East. The space under there, between the capstone
and the base stones? That’s where the bodies were kept.”

I kept looking at the
precise, the almost
mathematical
way the boulder was perched on those smaller
stones. It looked like an elephant with a dozen stumps for
legs.

“How did it get up
there?”

“Well, that’s the
question. First I was thinking it was from the glaciers, the
glaciers that formed the whole of Long Island. They carried the
rock along from wherever, and once they melted, the rock just
happened to be left resting on the base stones.”

“Sounds
reasonable.”

“Sure it does, except for
one thing.”

He moved a few feet and
pointed to a pair of base stones.

“You see there? One winter
I noticed the sun falling directly between these two stones.
Happened only for a day. And the day happened to be December 21,
the winter solstice, the sun at its lowest point. Same thing with
these two stones over here. On June 21, on the fucking summer
solstice? The light’ll fall straight between them.”

“So no
coincidence?”

“Not to me. To me, these
stones were placed here in a careful, planned-out arrangement, like
for a ritual or something. Now don’t ask me how they got the
capstone up there—I haven’t the slightest. But you take the
placement of the base stones and add in everything that goes on
here, it proves this was a sacred site. Other people felt the power
of this place. It means I’m not alone.”

I looked around. The woods
were silent now, and the bushes seemed to be trembling with light,
like a curtain blowing in the sun. I didn’t feel like I was
dreaming—it was more like life was dreaming me. My feet were on the
ground but my body was floating free, released from time, and this
day could’ve been a day from three years ago or a day from three
years ahead.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

CHAPTER 2

IT’S LIKE THE BIG BANG
NEVER HAPPENED

>>FRIDAY JUNE 15 (6
days to go)

FRIDAY JUNE 15, 10
a.m.

SIGHT SO SHARP IT WAS
BURNING THE AIR

I found a room in town, at
the Hidden Lake Hotel. They told me I was lucky—I’d made it in
before the weekend crush. Wooly had given me Georgiana Copely’s
number. I called from the room. A man picked up, said he was Ms.
Copely’s assistant. I told him who I was, I’m doing a story on
Wooly Cornell and I’d like to interview Ms. C. He said 10 would be
fine but it couldn’t go on forever. She had to be out for an 11:30
appointment.

Georgiana lived in the
same wealthy part of town that Wooly did, also in a house built on
the border of the woods. Only you couldn’t see hers from the road.
You had to pull into a concealed driveway camouflaged by bushes and
trees. Then you came to a massive Colonial that had to have been
standing unchanged for generations. Everything about it—the double
chimneys at each corner, the thick dark molding, the regal
isolation, even the vintage Jaguar XKE parked by the side—said
Classic.

A bed of dahlias had been
planted in front of the porch—all white except for one red flower
in the middle. A rogue red seed.

An Asian man who
identified himself as Marco Sung answered the polished copper
doorbell. He was tall and bony, with looping dark bags under his
eyes. Like any good photographer’s assistant, he was dressed all in
black.

The foyer was heavy, all
mahogany panels and each one hand carved in designs so intricate
and complex they were impossible to follow. It was like a museum of
gloom. When Marco led me into the living room I was half expecting
to see a casket laid out in the middle.

Not so. The room was
open-air clean and filled with sunlight, as bright as an atrium.
Georgiana’s photos were gallery-hung on all four walls. They were
all like the one Wooly owned—blurs of birch and moss, pearlized
lichen patterns, individual time/space warps created by some
alchemical amalgam of forest mist.

“Pretty incredible,” I
said.

Marco nodded—well of
course. “She had a photography career before she lost her sight.
Decent material, nothing outstanding. Then she began producing
these. She’s always said, my blindness gave me the courage to
fail.”

“It freed her
up.”

“It enabled her to grasp
forms in a new way, grasp the world in a different way. The trick,
she always says, is to capture nothing that isn’t there, and the
nothing that
is
there.”

I stood before a
photo—smoky flower shapes, as murky as if they’d been shot
underwater, almost too impressionistic to be real. The flower forms
reminded me of something.